Open Source

Microsoft Gets Open On Yammer SDKs

By Adrian Bridgwater, August 20, 2013

New open sourcing of SDKs for Windows Phone 8 and Apple iOS

Redmond's open source engines change gear this month with news that Microsoft enterprise social network subsidiary Yammer is open sourcing SDKs for Apple iOS and Windows Phone 8. The move is (of course) hoped to help extend the social tools within Yammer to connection points with other third-party enterprise applications.

The newly acquired Yammer (Microsoft purchased the company in 2012 for $1.2 billion) will not add Android to this list of openness, for now at least.

For application developers, these SDKs will work to help add Yammer's OAuth 2-based authentication to a piece of software. The SDKs offer both read and write access to Yammer's APIs to enable functional integration into apps.

"Once authenticated, programmers can use the SDKs to make REST calls to read/write from the Yammer API, thus integrating the full spectrum of Yammer's social services into your mobile app," said the company.

These mobile-centric software application development kits now augment the other SDKs from the Yammer family dedicated to functions working with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python.

According to the firm's blog, Yammer Engineering believes in moving quickly. "This is evident in the Yammer Platform, where developers can rapidly build social enterprise apps. Apps that can scale to Fortune 500-sized companies. To speed up the mobile app development process, we are also releasing Open Source SDKs for iOS and Windows Phone 8."

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said that the ability to bundle Yammer into enterprise license agreements "creates a recipe" for Microsoft to seed lots of licenses into the market quickly. "This does not necessarily mean that Yammer will be the right answer for all, but it will get it on a lot of shortlists," he said.

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